Thursday, December 03, 2015

what

Ten percent. A resilience tithe. Sort of, anyway. What they mean is they're getting grant money from the Rockefeller Foundation to pay themselves to do stuff.

The pledges commit the cities to a variety of resilience-building goals
and projects without raising additional money or taxes, the group said.
The pledge form on the organization's web site says that the pledge
lasts as long as the mayor remains in office, and that in return, 100
Resilient Cities will provide as much as $5 million worth of goods and
services in support of each city's goals.

But what stuff?

The pledge program allows cities to meet their goals through three major strategies:

Funding resilience initiatives by dedicating existing or planned
spending to support goals outlined in their resilience strategy,
including ongoing and new or pilot programs and projects.

Improving resilience value by leveraging initiatives that may
already be funded to achieve improved resilience not included in the
city's strategy. One method is to develop a "resilience screen" for
capital projects, budget items and procurements.

Enhancing existing policies and regulations, including leveraging or
partnering with private sector or third-party organizations.

A person wrote those sentences. That's a thing that happened in our real world waking lives. People produce this sort of verbiage for a living and then go home to their families with a proud sense of achievement in their hearts as if everything is as it should be. Last year Brookings prepared this list of facts about nuclear weapons. Number of U.S. nuclear bombs lost in accidents and never recovered: 11. Everything's fine, though.

Nobody has anything to be ashamed of or worried about. Isn't that what "resilience" is all about anyway? Cultivation of a comforting apathy through deliberate application of bullshit?

If the Landrieu Administration has properly internalized these values, it means they get roughly $5 million and they get to apply that money to... well whatever they feel like because "resilience." On one level that sounds pretty okay. Ostensibly it's about money coming in rather than going out.

But, in a more real sense, it's a mess of unaccountable-by-design appropriations combined with the seed of a "permanent office" of.. something or other which eventually will not be funded by grant money anymore. Maybe that's what the parking meter hike is for.

In the meantime, it's basically a rebranding of current operations. So, yay, a commercial for Mitch. "Improving resilience value by leveraging initiatives that may
already be funded to achieve improved resilience not included in the
city's strategy," does have a certain ring to it. I already like it better than "One voice, once city"